Full description from the venue
Leeahn Gallery is pleased to present Homing In Dedicated, a solo exhibition by Japanese-American artist Tomokazu Matsuyama, on view from August 27 through October 15, 2026. The exhibition marks Matsuyama's first solo exhibition in Korea and introduces, for the first time in Asia, a new body of work developed following his major solo exhibition in Tokyo last year and subsequently presented across the United States and Europe.
Tomokazu Matsuyama’s paintings bring together references drawn from diverse cultural and historical contexts, as well as from contemporary visual culture. Rather than blending these elements into a seamless whole, Matsuyama reconstructs them within a single pictorial space, allowing their distinct histories and associations to remain visible while new relationships emerge between them. The resulting compositions reflect the complexity of a contemporary world in which different cultures, memories, and visual languages continually intersect.
This painterly language is deeply rooted in Matsuyama's own life. Since relocating to New York in 2002, he has spent more than two decades working at the center of the global art world. Creating work within a city where multiple cultures and systems of value intersect has never been about preserving a singular identity. Instead, it has involved continuously accumulating diverse experiences and memories, translating them into an evolving visual language. His paintings neither represent nor simply merge different cultures; rather, they construct pictorial spaces that reflect the contemporary cultural landscape shaped through movement, exchange, and coexistence.
“Homing In” does not refer simply to returning to a place of origin. Rather, it describes a process of turning one’s attention toward the cultural memories, inherited sensibilities, and ways of seeing that have continued to inform Matsuyama’s practice across distance. These foundations are not fixed; through the experience of living and working elsewhere, they have been fragmented, reassembled, and transformed. In this sense, the exhibition reflects an enduring relationship with Asia that distance has complicated rather than diminished.
The new works presented in this exhibition further expand these ideas. The paintings do not depict a fixed or stable world. Irregularly shaped canvases dissolve the physical boundaries of painting, transforming the support itself into a sculptural element. Within these compositions, interiors and exteriors, natural and constructed environments, and references drawn from different cultural and historical contexts coexist within the same pictorial space. Blossoms appear alongside snow, day overlaps with night, and tropical vegetation exists beside temperate landscapes, dissolving conventional notions of time and seasonality. Reality is reconfigured according to the logic of memory and perception, allowing the paintings to unfold as psychological landscapes in which multiple places and temporalities coexist.
Decoration occupies a central role within these spaces, yet it functions as far more than visual embellishment. Traditionally, ornament has served to support narrative and establish atmosphere. In Matsuyama's paintings, however, patterns, colors, objects, textures, and spatial arrangements organize the composition itself. Ornament ceases to be secondary and instead becomes a visual language through which cultural memories and accumulated experiences encounter one another and generate new relationships.
The recurring equestrian figures throughout the exhibition further embody this narrative of movement and return. Historically associated with authority, conquest, and triumph, the horse and rider are reimagined here as figures traversing cultures and histories. As Matsuyama observes, "the rider remains suspended between histories—carrying the weight of what the form has represented, and the possibility of a homecoming shaped by distance." Rather than symbolizing victory, these figures evoke the enduring journey itself, becoming metaphors for the fluid identities and cultural memories of those who continually move between worlds.
In an era defined by the constant circulation of images and cultures, Matsuyama’s paintings draw on the visual density of contemporary life while examining how cultural memory and lived experience coexist and form new relationships. The works invite viewers to reflect on questions of identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance in an increasingly interconnected world.
Homing In Dedicated presents the current development of Matsuyama’s painterly practice. Across the exhibition, cultural memory and lived experience are continually reconfigured through movement and distance, framing return not as a movement back toward a fixed origin but as an evolving relationship with what continues to shape the present. Rather than offering a single answer to questions of belonging, the exhibition leaves them open through the language of painting.